A new, voluntary voice viewer is available for download. It includes changes to the voice code that will improve audio quality on slow or congested internet connections, older Macintosh hardware, and some kinds of analog microphones.

Version 1.18.1:

An updated, optional Voice First Look viewer is available for download on the First Look webpage. A mandatory Voice First Look will be released this Monday. Monday’s mandatory Voice First Look will be the last one we release - after that, voice will be available as a feature in the main viewer.

Today’s optional Voice First Look includes a long list of fixes (those of you who have been using the Voice First Look know *exactly* how long that list is). If you’re interested, please read the complete release notes on the fixes we’ve made. The voice team could not have found, reproduced, narrowed down, and fixed all of these issues without the help of Residents who have taken the time to post Public JIRA bugs and feature requests, and share their thoughts at open office hours and in-world bug triage meetings. Thank you.

Today’s optional release includes a few other highlights, including a voice set-up wizard that appears upon login, during first voice use, to help Residents quickly set up voice.

A new voice preference enables all Residents to “Only accept calls from My Friends” if you wish.

By popular demand, we’ve also added a mic tuning feature that allows Residents to adjust their own mic volume and settings from within the viewer (i.e., outside of system preferences/settings). The mic tuner is included in the voice set-up wizard and can also be accessed via the new “device settings” in Edit > Preferences > Voice Chat.

Finally, this release lets callers know if a Resident they’re trying to reach is offline, when a caller attempts to start a one-to-one voice conversation with another Resident.

Version 1.18

The day of liberation is almost upon us. In the next release, 1.18, we’ll be shipping a project called “Message Liberation”. This project lets us make almost all viewer updates be optional, so you can download them if and when you want.

Second Life has a “message system”, which is the code that moves information between the viewer and the simulators (servers). The message system has a file, called the template, that describes the format and encoding of the information. In the past, when that template changed, even a tiny bit, all the programs in the system had to be updated to use it and restarted. This meant that if someone added a feature or fixed a bug, you needed to download a new viewer, even if it didn’t affect you.

When the message system is “liberated” from the template, it will be possible for most changes to be backward and forward compatible with different versions of the software. This means that you don’t need to download a new viewer every time. If you just want to pop in-world, and don’t need the latest features just this moment, you can skip the download dialog and proceed in-world. Of course, you won’t get the new feature or fix until you do download the new version, but it’ll be your choice when you want to do so.

This change also means that we can do many more kinds of changes using the rolling update method, rather than having to bring the whole grid down.

Now, to be sure, there are still some kinds of changes where we’ll require you to download a new viewer. Closing security holes is a likely example. And there are others, like some database maintenance, where we’ll have to close the entire grid for an update. But, our aim is to do these as little as possible, and Message Liberation goes a long way to making that possible.